Bubbles that cure cancer, Facebook's counterterrorism strategy, tracking down paedophiles on the dark web and performance tips from a Formula One champion were just some of the subjects tackled at WIRED's festival of ideas and innovation in November. Investors, startups and scientists and inventors heard from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, DeepMind's Mustafa Suleyman and Pando editor-in-chief Sarah Lacy talked at the event - as well as dozens of makers, influencers and world-changers. It proved to be a mind-expanding, inspirational event. Read on for the best of the talks.

The mind of a champion

Nico Rosberg

With a Formula One racing record of 23 Grand Prix wins and 30 pole positions, Nico Rosberg knows what it takes to win a championship. But to understand this, he's taken a slightly different approach. "I took a mental trainer," he said. "Having a brain doctor, you're seen as a bit of a loser. I was one of the first guys to do that; I really tried to improve my whole mental approach to racing." What he learned was to simplify his life, focus on the things that really matter and to be aware of his emotions and feelings. "In the decisive moments I just had that little bit more focus and clarity of mind to not make any mistakes and to bring that championship home."

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The 32-year-old racing-driver-turned entrepreneur said he realised he had what it took to become a Formula One champion at the age of six. Building on those skills to make it happen required dedication in order to optimise. "In the most intense moments, I didn't make a single mistake and that's where I get my evidence that mental training must be beneficial," he said.

Rosberg won the F1 title in 2016 before, in a move that shocked the sport, quitting without warning. He told the WIRED Live audience how he now wants to invest his time in companies that are disrupting the automobile industry. "That's a passion. I just love to be involved with companies that change our planet."

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The digital fight against oppression

Firuzeh Mahmoudi

Firuzeh Mahmoudi wants to improve life inside Iran from the outside. Born in the US but raised in the Middle East, she left the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 2009, she organised a global day of rallies in support of reformist Iranians who marched on the streets of Tehran in protest of what they saw as a rigged election. She started the not-for-profit United4Iran, which works for civil liberties, but after the regime cracked down on dissent, conventional NGO activity became increasingly difficult.

In response, she launched Irancubator, a contest to make Android apps that build basic digital services to promote civil liberties, such as accessing legal advice information, enabling GPS data sharing with immediate emergency contacts, support services for drug addicts and tracking illiteracy. Another feature involves protecting women from harassment and domestic abuse, which starts with talking to children. One of those apps is called Mishka. "Sex is often a challenging taboo," she said. "Mishka gives a tool for parents that want to protect their children but don't have the skills to talk about it." The apps, she added, empower women and men not familiar with their rights to take control of their own bodies, even in the face of oppression. The response she's had has been more than she expected. Pointing to a video of jubilant civilians from her homeland, she said "Not only are Iranians running with it, they're dancing on it."

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WikiTribune aims to beat fake news

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales hates fake news - but not in the same way as Donald Trump. The co-founder of Wikipedia wants to use the world's fifth-most-visited website's fact-checking methodology to create a platform for real journalism. To do this, he will bypass disruptive ads, clickbait and irrelevant content and place community at its centre. "It will only be the news service we envision when the community plays a full role," he said. The goal is to build a global, multilingual and neutral news service where quality is prioritised over speed. "If your business model drives you in that direction rather than towards viral headlines and clickbait and inflammatory stuff, then hopefully we'll produce work that is consistent with that."

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To get WikiTribune off the ground, one of the challenges Wales faced was asking people to give money to a project still in the making where outputs are still intangible and the scope is difficult to scale. "I need people to come and read an article and say, 'OK, wow, I didn't see that anywhere else, I understand the world in a way I didn't before. This deserves to exist and I should chip in and this is meaningful to me,'" he said.

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Designing a sustainable future

Marcus Engman

How can designers help make cities more comfortable to live in, asked IKEA's head of design, Marcus Engman. For the answer, it sent its design team to Nasa.

"People are living in smaller spaces as urbanisation increases," Engman told the conference. "We spent three days living in Nasa's Utah-based Mars Desert Research habitat to see what we could learn from the smallest living space around."

The team follows IKEA's five principles of democratic design: sustainable, functional, affordable, attractive and high quality. One example is IKEA's Water Carafe 365. "It's easy to clean, fits in a fridge door and is strong enough for a dishwasher," he explained. "It's also nudging people to behave better so our three billion customers will use more tap water."

The company is now collaborating with Teenage Engineering for party lighting, African designers on open-source furniture and women refugees in Jordan to create textile factories - as well as developing simple tools for an ageing population.

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"We are a vision-driven company - we want to create a better everyday life for the many," he said.

Disruptors need worker rules, too

Annie Powell

If your startup cannot afford to give employees the national minimum wage and sick pay, then how viable is your business in the first place, asked Annie Powell, employment lawyer at legal firm Leigh Day.

"We need to change the narrative to say the measure of a startup is one whose tech is good enough that it can succeed without exploiting people or breaking the rules," she argued.

Powell represents Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders in their fight for employment rights. In October 2016, she persuaded the judge at the London Central Employment Tribunal that Uber's drivers are not "self-employed", as those companies claim, but workers entitled to minimum wage and paid holiday.

Uber is appealing the verdict. Deliveroo is also preparing for court next summer - by arguing that their drivers and riders are contractors. "That doesn't fit with the way those companies actually do business," she explained. Powell explained how riders and drivers are being punished for turning down work, citing examples where Deliveroo is enforcing shifts and Uber refused to pass on details of a passenger who racially abused a driver.

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"One argument is that these companies have a special vital energy that is stifled by government and regulation," she pointed out. "That Uber and Deliveroo use technology to liberate workers. From my experience, I think that's wrong - they use technology to control, not liberate."

Veins are the new fingerprints

Dame Sue Black

It's time for technology to help stop child abuse and the sharing of indecent images, Dame Sue Black told the WIRED Live audience. "We can design out crime - in 2015, technology produced the lowest level of car theft ever recorded," she pointed out. "I cannot believe that the tech industry can't find a simple way to make it harder for people to take images, upload them and share them."

Black, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Dundee and the director of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, worked on identification initiatives after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Since focusing on paedophiles in 2006, she has secured 32 life sentences and 300 years of prison time for criminals, thanks to a detection method she developed based on vein-pattern recognition. "No two hands have the same superficial vein pattern," she explained. "Not in identical twins, not even your right and left hands."

Paedophiles tend to film their own crimes, Black said. This allows her to match incriminating footage to suspects. "The first time we see the original image we have a chance to get to that child and rescue them." But with about a million child-abuse images uploaded to the dark web every day, and sites that get up to one million hits an hour, the task is overwhelming.

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"We need to design it out before we get to that," she explained to the room. "We will never eradicate child sex abuse but we can make it more difficult for them to get access to children, to share pictures and use abuse as a commodity."

Fighting extremism with tech

Bjorn Ihler

We are living in our own bubbles of information - and the results can be fatal, technologist and peace activist Bjorn Ihler warned.

Ihler spoke from personal experience - six years ago, on the southern tip of Norway's Utøya island, far-right terrorist Anders Breivik took aim at Ihler's head, fired and missed.

"I thought I was going to die," he told the conference. "He shot past me by centimetres. I fell over into the water and managed to scramble behind some rocks to safety." Breivik killed 69 people before he was arrested.

Ihler has been trying to understand Breivik's actions ever since - reading his manifesto and attending his trial. He met former extremists and concluded that "Extremists have one thing in common - they isolate themselves and think that something is pure. They can't live with the idea of diversity."

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Now he's working on a solution: harnessing technology to burst bubbles and help us see each other as human beings. "If we can do that, we are on the right path to ending violent extremism," he told the room. "Share ideas - be open to diversity."

We need to overcome the coded gaze

Joy Buolamwini

Joy Buolamwini is a social-impact technologist who fights bias in machine learning, or what she has dubbed "the coded gaze". At university, Buolamwini found that facial-recognition software wasn't recognising her, even though it was recognising the faces of her classmates. The software detected her only when she put on a white mask. What she discovered was that organisations and startups around the world were using the same generic facial-recognition software, which had been trained using machine-learning techniques centred around data sets from predominately white male faces. If these sets aren't diverse, any face that deviates too far from the established norm won't be detected.

"If we have largely pale, male datasets, we're going to be destined to fail the rest of society," she said.

Buolamwini explained how, in the United States, police are beginning to use facial recognition as part of criminal investigations - and there will be serious consequences if the software gets it wrong. To overcome this, asking who codes, how they code, and why they code matters. "Daring to ask uncomfortable questions must continue to happen - and also daring to ask intersectional questions. That way we can see if there's over-representation that might be masking problems or if we're overshadowing certain groups."

Our future will be multiversal

Herman Narula

Herman Narula is building the Matrix. The CEO and co-founder of London-based startup Improbable told the Keynote Stage that the future of gaming will have a drastic impact on culture and societies. There are 2.6 billion gamers around the world today - and Narula says it's time to take notice of them. In 2017, Improbable became one of the UK's $1 billion (£764,000) tech startups after raising $500 million funding from Softbank. Its ultimate goal? To create totally immersive, persistent virtual worlds - and in doing so, changing how we make decisions in the physical world based on simulations.

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Narula explained how gaming has already gone beyond playing. "Now, video games and gaming worlds are starting to produce behaviour that doesn't look like just people entertaining themselves by engaging with the game directly. We are starting to see players become professionals, become creators." This means that gaming could be the antidote to a world of automation. There will be further transformation, he said, where "value can be created, jobs can perhaps be had, experiences can occur which can blend the boundaries between simply passively consuming something and actually having meaningful experiences."

But this won't mean the real world will be replaced; rather Narula envisions we will be "living multiversal lives, jumping between worlds in the context, engaging with people and activities that today we can scarcely imagine."

How to build a smart city

Sadiq Khan

The Mayor of London champions his city as a hub for technology and innovation. Sadiq Khan opened WIRED Live, revealing his plan to cement this status. Khan recently recruited London's first chief digital officer, Theo Blackwell, to transform London into a leading smart city and announced a £7 million investment in digital talent recruitment. "If we're to build a tech talent pipeline that business needs, not just for tech-focused sectors but across our entire economy, we need to invest and utilise the abilities of all Londoners," he said.

As part of this, Khan announced an initiative to develop the new London Smart Plan, which includes a series of investment events where new local startups can pitch their ideas to angel investors.

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Broadening access to digital-skills opportunities means London will continue to be a top pick for startups who want to expand their reach and scale up against international markets. "I'm quite clear that if we're to safeguard our competitiveness and reputation for cutting-edge innovation, we must stay true to our open and outwards-looking traditions," said Khan.

Fixing the antibiotics crisis

Dame Sally Davies

If we don't tackle antibiotic resistance urgently, it will wipe us out before climate change does, England's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies told the conference. Bugs are evolving to beat drugs - "and they're winning," she explained. Seven-hundred thousand people around the world die every year from drug-resistant infections - 5,000 of them in the UK.

"Drug-resistant infections are already hitting the vulnerable - the young, the old, pregnant and immune compromised - and the death rate will rise to ten million people every year by 2050," she warned. "That will cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $100 trillion [£45tn to £75tn] every year, wiping out growth across the world."

The solution is innovation - from finding ways to teach patients not to ask for antibiotics through to changing their use in agriculture by improving farm hygiene to creating devices that prevent infection: a 3D-printed cow shoe containing an antibiotic has been invented that stops the infection and the drug entering the environment.

Most importantly, she explained, we need to develop new drugs. "We have market failure. There have been no new classes of antibiotics since the 80s. British startups are struggling to find investment - we need to make the case for investment."

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It's a solvable problem if we can build global partnerships, she concluded. "But don't forget drug-resistant tuberculosis, HIV and malaria… all infections can evolve and adapt. And if we don't fight back, the bugs will win."

Art needs technology to progress

Yana Peel

In a digital world, Yana Peel, CEO of London's Serpentine Galleries, wants to keep museums from becoming mausoleums. "Will the traditional museum be replaced or revived by new technology?" she asked. "We have an opportunity to use tech in a way that makes culture deeper, rather than shallower."

Peel made her name as co-founder of the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and CEO of debate forum Intelligence Squared before becoming the galleries' first CEO. "The Serpentine is a beloved 50-year old institution, but over the last year we've been thinking of ourselves as a startup that's only as strong as the quality of our ideas," she explained. "As Andy Warhol said, good business is the best art."

"Exploration and experimentation transgresses media, geographies and age groups to create experiences," she said. "Technology is vital for creating the highly advanced experiences that Arthur C Clarke referred to as 'magic'."

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We need to rethink our feelings

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Our emotions aren't what we think they are. Professor of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett told the audience the implications of this could be far reaching as she described her theory that challenges the classical view that emotions are hard-wired and universal. She argues for a more holistic view, which she describes as "constructed emotion". This explores evidence that emotions are created spontaneously in several brain regions and are influenced by past experiences.

"The brain's internal model works like a scientist, she said. "It makes a prediction about what's going to happen in the world and in the body and then compares its prediction to incoming sensory inputs from the world and from the body. If it's correct, that prediction becomes your experience."

Universal emotions are taught in pre-school and these assumed stereotypes are used all the way through to cross-cultural communication strategies in international politics and industry. Then there's the emotion economy, she said, where companies spend time, money and effort to develop gadgets and apps to read human emotions. "When you consider that all this money and creativity is being expended, its mind-boggling that they're being inspired by a misunderstanding of the nature of emotion."

Swipe right for equality

Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney Wolfe Herd is tackling sexism online. She co-founded dating app Tinder but quickly realised the issues women faced when navigating the dating world online. In response to this she founded Bumble in 2014, a similar app with one key difference: the woman initiates interaction when a match is made. The platform has attracted 18 million users.

"Something amazing started to happen," she told the room. "Women felt safe and started having positive interactions. People started taking to the platform for friendships and then networking; because there was the shield, women could make the first move and they weren't being bombarded or solicited."

Now, Wolfe Herd wants to replicate that safe space in day-to-day social interactions such as friendships and networking. Her next project is Bumble Bizz, which tackles sexism on networking sites. "What happens on platforms like LinkedIn is similar to what happens on dating platforms where men have been known to abuse the system and solicit women for endeavours which are not professional," she told the room.

As she pioneers the next wave of digital connectivity, Wolfe Herd said we are obliged to make sure it's done right. "We want a platform rooted in respect and won't allow isogynistic behaviour to happen here. We have a duty to reconfigure digital behaviour that is pervasive with nastiness."

Changing the rules of war

General Sir Richard Barrons

There's no guarantee that in our lifetime war is not going to affect all of us, General Sir Richard Barrons warned the room - and the tech industry is making that more, not less, likely.

"Our planet is running out of the capacity to meet our demands," the former commander Joint Forces Command explained. "Discretionary wars like Afghanistan will become wars of necessity where people fight for existential reasons."

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These new wars won't be like those we've fought before, he warned. "A cruise missile from Russia can take 90 minutes to reach us, ballistic missiles can cross the world in 20 minutes and a cyberattack on critical infrastructure is instant."

Open source data, commercial low-Earth orbit satellites, AI and robotics on land, sea, air and space mean civil and military society must collaborate on ethical challenges, he argued.

"If you attack a compound today you send a soldier in to find the terrorist," he explained. "In the future, a machine will go through that breach first, look around and come to a conclusion about applying lethal force based on its algorithm. We need a debate on this transformation."

This article was first published in the January/February 2018 issue of WIRED magazine